Chess and its players make for good reading

I was never a chess player. In my university days, I almost did not get through my sophomore year, playing bridge non-stop. The Igloo, my hangout, was divided into two parts, one for the chess players, the other for tables of bridge. In those long gone days, bells still rang noting class changes.

“You going?” I was often asked. Working on a three no-trump bid, I blew off another course, staying at the table for hours upon hours. Ditto the chess players, endlessly poring over their pieces, striking clocks between moves. And those were the days before Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky.

Bridge was an obsession. That I will admit now. I’ve played the game in odd places, here in my farmhouse, at tables in a St. John’s bar, on many a New Year’s Eve. Chess? I drifted back to the game now and again, never really interested (or that good). Finally, the chessboard and Crown Royal bag joined the other cast off board games under an upstairs bed – and stayed there.

Until I ran across Brin-Jonathan Butler’s The Grandmaster: Magnus Carlsen and the Match That Made Chess Great Again (Simon & Schuster, $35). I had just finished Butler’s Domino Days, an account of Castro’s Cuba and Santiago’s boxers when I was drawn to The Grandmaster. Great chess rarely makes for great reading – but this one blew me away.

“What we need are more Norwegian immigrants!” I didn’t say that. Trump did. Well, he didn’t get them.

In the fall of 2016 crowds of people swarmed outside Trump Tower in Manhattan to rail against the election of Donald Trump. Hundreds more converged on New York City’s South Side Seaport to watch the World Chess Championship between Norways’s Magnus Carlsen and Russia’s Sergey Karjakin that, by the time it was over, would be front-page news and thought by many to be the greatest finish in chess history.

More than six hundred million people around the world play chess. Brin-Jonathan Butler was not one of them when Simon & Schuster came calling. The publisher’s editor thought Butler would be the perfect writer to cover the match. “Especially since I’d made a career from writing about characters on the outer margins of the sports world. Mostly boxers, bullfighters, and controversial high-profile athletes.” Butler took the job. The Grandmaster is the book.

Not only do I not play chess, I don’t read about it – until now. That 2016 match pitted Putin’s favourite against Carlsen, an admirer of Donald Trump (indeed, his first move of the game was what is called today The Trompowsky Attack). The Russian leader was barred from attending while Trump advisor Peter Theil made the honorary first move in sudden death.

That’s right – to the very end. Oddsmakers had given Carlsen, the defending champion, an 80 per cent change of winning. Did he? Butler’s editor gave him three questions to answer. The final one was would Magnus Carlsen be able to avoid the unhinged fate of Fischer and Paul Morphy and Peter Winston and so many others – who went mad in the long run?

With chapters that are titled “On the Edge of the Abyss” and “I am unusual, a Little” Butler pays the grandmasters their due and investigates deeply their mental states, before and after grand matches. Many went nuts.

This grand book (I don’t care if you play or not, it is fun reading) led me, of course, to films and other books. Especially, books and stuff about Bobby Fischer. In 1972 he went up against Spassky and won. Two films give the story its due. The first was Searching for Bobby Fischer while the second was Pawn Sacrifice starring Toby Maguire and Peter Sarsgaard. Both gave me a shudder of recognition. There, but by the Grace of God, goes obsession.

Even if you don’t give a damn about chess or Bobby Fischer, he was one demented, talented player who died in self-exile in Iceland years ago. I went hunting for a biography and found Engame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall – from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness (Broadway Books, $20). Written by Frank Brady (who met and played against Fischer when Bobby was only 10) this is a tense treatise, a nerve-wracking piece of a book.

It’s a long one, 450 pages of Bobby stuff including his 1972 match (that made chess a national mania in the United States) with his increasingly strange behaviour. After years of poverty while living on Los Angles’s Skid Row, Bobby got a rematch in ’92, cheered the collapse of the twin towers, and died walking lonely Iceland Roads in 2005. So, who was Bobby Fischer? Read Brady and find out.

I finished my chess marathon were it should have begun. David Shenk encapsulated the sport (if it could be called that) with The Immortal Game: A History of Chess or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Science, and the Human Brain (Anchor Canada, $22).

Chess, as it turns out, is the most enduring and universal game in history, invented 1,600 years ago in ancient Persia. The Immortal Game is a so very readable book that follows chess from medieval Europe up to Norman Schwarzkopf. Along the way, Shenk examines a single legendary game that took place in London in 1851. It is a spry book, a gift to the reader, a compelling guide for both novices and aficionados alike.

Shenk writes, “One need not have any passion for the game itself to be utterly captivated by its centuries of compelling tales, and to appreciate its importance as a thought tool for an emerging civilization. Chess is a teaching and learning instrument older than chalkboards, printed books, the compass, the telescope.”

I think it is past time to get my chess board and pieces from under the bed, dust them off and say, “white or black,” take your choice.